Scott Hansen is a designer whose work comes out of the blending of vector illustrations with photoshop raster images giving a unique and gritty feel to his compositions. His themes strongly revolve around 70's retro colors, outdated computer equipment, nature scenes, sweeping rainbow lines and incredibly textured backgrounds. The print he made for Obama's campaign was said to be a 2.77 GB file. Mammouth. He also has a dj project called Tycho, and a rather impressive blog. 
A design duo of Vicki Wong and Michael Murphy make up Meomi. Usually I don't go for the cutesy critters or mawing monsters, But I must admit the amount of work that goes into these illustrations cannot be missed. The color palettes are perfect and relaxing, and they make use of textures quite nicely. Their impressive flash driven site holds much of their work through commercial cartoons, product identities, books, as well as calendars and videos.
Bombo is an Italian illustrator named Maurizio Santucci. His work has a child-like style to it, but is usually quite full of textures and brushes that make it pop out above others. His most recent "shadow box" installations are things I'd love to do, illustrations cut out on a plotter, and then layered in a 3d manner with depth and shadow effects. I linked to his Flickr site if only that his Milk Gone Bad series can be seen as a octopus-like floor lamp.
A Brazilian illustrator-designer, Cristiano Siqueira has a portfolio that is full of stunningly realistic images. Some of his work is through photoshop where his surreal subject matter is digitized and fragmenting wildly away from itslef. Most of his illustrations are women where his use of color gradients, and gradient meshes are astounding, and his attention to detail is fine and focused. It is also nice to see some very different styles in his client work, comic-like superhero images, contemporary illustrations for food items, even throwbacks to traditional Brazilian illustration styles.
